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Sometimes there are discoveries on the Web that don't necessarily make you say, "Wow! Really?" but nevertheless make you stop and think.

If you don't have a Flash player, get one free here. Then take a look at this. The animation is a bit tacky, but Eric Idle (a Monty Python alumnus) provides a unique perspective, guaranteed to cure the holiday blues.

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolvingAnd revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,A sun that is the source of all our power.The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can seeAre moving at a million miles a dayIn an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.We go 'round every two hundred million years,And our galaxy is only one of millions of billionsIn this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expandingIn all of the directions it can whizzAs fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,How amazingly unlikely is your birth,And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,'Cause there's bugger all* down here on Earth.

TH

* For those who don't understand English (or Englishmen), "bugger all" means "none at all" in American

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